11/06:: 'COCO' - MORE WORK IN PROGRESS

I'm not sure it looks like it, but I've spent approximately 5 hours working on this portrait today. 

I have several reference photos of 'Coco' and she is a very dark chocolate/almost black colour in most.  In this reference she has the light in her face and it shows up the beautiful red/brown colouring but makes her neck/shoulders look much darker by comparison. 
So I'm taking my time putting in lots of red/terracotta/carmine/chocolate/lilac/pink and even blue into the base coat and these will help add depth when the final more detailed layer is added.

I'm using mostly Derwent Pastels pencils here as they are slightly thicker/softer than Pitt Pastel pencils which I'll use for the finer detail later on

You may have noticed that I found the 'design' button Blogger have kindly added to the blog headers recently. I idly looked at what it offered and found myself with a whole new look!!

They say a change is as good as a rest and I'm not unhappy with this template.  Is it OK at your end??

I've viewed it in IE8 and Chrome and it appears to be readable in both but as the template page is much wider then my previous set-up I hope its all 'viewable'.

The major plus point is that I can make my images larger - that's why you're now viewing them 'warts n all' but, obviously, pastels are meant to be viewed from a distance rather than how you see these .... 

My next goal must be to sort all the images in my Picasa album into categories so I can link my blog to specific dog/cat/horse/human gallery pages .... another thing on the 'to do' list.